to a writers' workshop, continuing to a fateful lunch in New York
in the mid-Nineties when I showed him a bunch of Project
Gutenberg texts on my Palm Pilot and inspired him to start
licensing Tor's titles for PDAs [PEANUTPRESS SCREENGRAB], to the
turn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then published my first
novel (he's bought three more since -- I really like Patrick!).

Right as bookwarez newgroups were taking off, I was shocked silly
by legal action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warner
for carrying the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup. This writer
alleged that AOL should have a duty to remove this newsgroup,
since it carried so many infringing files, and that its failure
to do so made it a contributory infringer, and so liable for the
incredibly stiff penalties afforded by our newly minted copyright
laws like the No Electronic Theft Act and the loathsome Digital
Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA.

Now there was a scary thought: there were people out there who
thought the world would be a better place if ISPs were given the
duty of actively policing and censoring the websites and
newsfeeds their customers had access to, including a requirement
that ISPs needed to determine, all on their own, what was an
unlawful copyright infringement -- something more usually left up
to judges in the light of extensive amicus briefings from
esteemed copyright scholars [WIND DONE GONE GRAPHIC].

This was a stupendously dumb idea, and it offended me down to my
boots. Writers are supposed to be advocates of free expression,
not censorship. It seemed that some of my colleagues loved the
First Amendment, but they were reluctant to share it with the